Tuesday, October 30, 2012

On
Election Eve, Monday 5th, escape all the chatter of pundits, all the
political posturing and jockeying to contemplate our turbulent times and
the importance of your choice. Let timeless ART in Music and Image
touch your heart and mind and giv'em strength to make that good vote.

Eduardo Delgado

Fresh
from performing with the great Martha Argerich in Argentina, our dear
friend Eduardo Delgado will play Mozart's Piano Sonata in A minor,
K.310.

Elicia Silverstein

Violinist Elicia Silverstein made her CU debut back in April with a Mozart Trio. She returns this evening to perform solo: the Bach Sonata #1 in G minor for solo violin.

Kirill GliadkovskyAnna Nizhegorodtseva

Appearing
at CU for the first time are two Russian pianists performing Russian
repertoire. Kirill Gliadkovsky comes to CU by way of the prestigious
Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow and our own USC, and playing around
the world with important conductors and orchestras. He will be
performing Taneyev, Medtner, and Rachmaninoff. Rising young talent
Anna Nizhegorodtseva will perform an excerpt from Prokofiev's
intensely virtuosic Piano Sonata #7.

Victor de Almeida Harout Senekeremian

Returning to CU, but for the first time as a duo, violist Victor de Almeida and pianist Harout Senekeremian will perform Concertpiece by Georges Enesco.

Courtney D. Jones Pepi Pilibossian

Finally,
trumpet virtuoso Courtney D. Jones, who never fails to bring down the
house, will perform his arrangement of Purcell and Gershwin (there's an
eclectic pair!) with CU and YouTube sensation Pepi Pilibossian on
piano.

Whether it's a wrath of nature or a wrath of politicking, let's celebrate the eternal

life - force of humanity that overcomes it all!

As always - bring your spirits, food and drink for you and your friends to enjoy. Please RSVP via Paypal. If you have problems with PayPal - don't wait - email us right away!

for graciously providing us with their incomparable instrument. On November 5th we will have CD213 - their newest C&A piano to the group of concert pianos.

Classical Underground Showcase:

Adam Miller

"Among The Ruins" 79" x 57" oil on canvas

We are privileged to
welcome for November's CU showcase one of our East Coast "brothers," a
wonderful New York artist Adam Miller.

It is so exciting to see how the young generation of some of the
most promising American artists is resolutely making Realism grounded in
a classical tradition the language of choice in expressing our modern
thoughts, views and feelings. With strong influences of Baroque and
Mannerist masters, Adam's classically inspired imagery carries a strong
sense of unabashed Romanticism.

Today, as we experience dramatic change in the flow of global
events, and rapid shifts in the ways society used to function through
the last century, the Romantic notion of the liberating of the Personal
is once again destined to shift the course of cultural history through
the work of this great new generation.

"Among the Ruins looks at different family's existing in a post
industrial world looking back at what appears to be the remnants of a
time of great expansion and strength from a distance after the machinery
of state has collapsed. The new hope represented by their children
exists against the darkness of the scattered corpse like remnants of
their world. But as the darkest day of winter is also the beginning of
the suns return these families are the first to begin rebuilding their
society and planting new crops" - describes the gallery Adam's work.

As Bob Schieffer's Mom said "Go Vote, it makes you feel big and strong"

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

The
summer has flown by like Endeavor on a 747, and suddenly it is not
only fall, not only October, but the start of Classical Underground's
sixth season. Our heads are spinning but somehow a fine program has
come together, with a distinctly eastern-European timbre.

Musica Vitale

Musica
Vitale is a choral group devoted to unjustly neglected a cappella
chamber music of the 19th and 20th centuries -- in our case, works by
Georgy Sviridov and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Something new to CU and sure
to be a glorious sound!

Rufus Choi

Hometown
pianist Rufus Choi's star has been rising since he won the first Jose
Iturbi International Competition. He makes his CU debut performing Haydn Variations and Ravel's La Valse, evoking the decadence of
turn-of-the-century Vienna.

Offering
more Ravel but of an entirely different color, CU faves Moni Simeonov
(violin) and Pepi Pilibosian (piano) will play his Hungarian-themed
Tzigane. Moni returns with pianist Georgi Slavchev and cellist Yoshika
Masuda to perform a few movements from Ravel's ravishing Piano Trio.

Ambroise AubrunAnna Sarkisova

With
USC thus represented, we must offer some UCLA talent for balance! Also
making their CU debuts, violinist Ambroise Aubran and pianist Anna
Sarkisova will play an excerpt of Brahms' Sonata #3 (which, stretching
our eastern theme, debuted in Budapest with Brahms at the piano).

As always - bring your spirits, food and drink for you and your friends to enjoy. Please RSVP via PayPal above. If you have problems with PayPal - don't want - email us right away!

for graciously providing us with their incomparable instrument. On October 1st we will have CD213 - their newest C&A piano to the group of concert pianos.

******

Classical Underground Showcase:

TONY PRO

We
are proud to showcase “El Comico Divino”, a magnificent and important
work by a great friend, LA artist Tony Pro. This masterful painting
represents a mile-stone in Tony’s creative search, reconsiders the idea
of Beauty and transforming it into an engaging and forceful visual
statement.It is enormously exhilarating to feel how LA is boiling with
new ideas at the moment. With soul-searching questions about the
future direction of the art world appearing almost daily from its
various corners, our notorious LA gang -- in a resurging realism of
our time which I call NOVOREALISM -- is making itself heard and felt
with ever-rising force.

Tony Pro "El Comoco Divino"

Over the summer,
the venerable American Artist Magazine published a big article on our
movement. My brothers-in-ART and ardent Undregrounders Jeremy Lipking,
Tony Pro and myself just had an exciting three-hour presentation of our
ideas at one of the year's most anticipated realist-artist's
gatherings, The Weekend With The Masters. The Representational Art
Conference held by California Lutheran University in just few weeks has
invited us to discuss the same topic.

It is also
exciting to see our East Coast brothers resolutely making Realism
grounded in tradition a language of choice in expressing our modern
thoughts, views and feelings. A perfect example is an "Empire"
exhibition of new works by New York artist and friend Martin Wittfooth
at the edgy, provocative and forward-looking Corey Helford Gallery in
Culver City.

"Envisioning the
familiar with the foreign, the paintings portray 'empire' as a dream in
mythical repetition. The past becomes a painterly vision of a global
psyche, lucid in theme, vibrant with tonality and color" - the gallery
describes Martin's work.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

As our CU family is due to greatly expand in May, we are celebrating our last concert of the season a bit early, with a brilliant lineup of Classical Underground star performers.

We are so fortunate to have Eduardo Delgado as a frequent guest, for there is no finer performer anywhere of the Argentinian repertoire -- on this occasion works by Carlos Guastavino, Alberto Ginastera, and Eduardo's show-stopping favorite, "Adios Nonino," by Astor Piazzolla.

With hands that remarkably resemble the great master's own 12-note spanners -- and not forgetting a musical lineage of the highest Russian tradition that he is in turn passing on through his International Piano Academy in Freiburg -- Jura Margulis is uniquely gifted for playing the virtuoso repertoire of Sergei Rachmaninoff. For CU, he will perform a selection of Rachmaninoff's op. 23 and op. 32 Preludes, the height of late Romanticism from the dawn of the 20th century.

Jura Margulis

Returning to CU after too long an absence, crowd favorite violinist Moni Simeonov will perform Brahms along with CU newcomer Jiayi Shi on piano, a frequent partner of Moni's great teacher Midori.

Moni Simeonov

Jiayi Shi

In February we were delighted by the CU debuts of pianist/composer Anna Drubich and the terrific cellist Evgeny Tonkha. Joined by violinist Elicia Silverstein, they cap the season with a deliciously diverse pair of trios from Mozart and Piazzolla.

Evgeny Tonkha, cello Elicia Silverstein , violin Anna Drubich, piano

As always - bring your spirits, food and drink for you and your friends to enjoy. Please RSVP via Paypal above. If you have problems with Paypal - email us right away.

It is an honor and a privilege to showcase one of California's legendary realist painters, John Asaro. It is hard to overstate the importance of this unique artist to a resurgence of California Realism, as well as to the development of an entire new generation of today's leading California figurative painters to whom he served as inspiration, encouragement and an example in contrast to the largely aesthetically hostile art scene of a seemingly long gone "modernist domination" past.

John Asaro

51 x 72 in

In the trajectory that saw one of the Golden State's eminent artists transforming from a long career in "genre scenes" into what the artist describes as "figure portrait arrangements," it seams that John's deep interest in exploring the coloristic effects of an intense California sun transformed into an equally intense desire to "re-construct" the figure out of a violent clash of bold colors and gestural lines, stark flat almost electric backgrounds, and the tonally rendered forms of human flesh through a shear force of a dynamic brushwork.

John's work stands as a great example of the enduring powers of Realism as a human visual language, as well as the boundless possibilities this remarkable language presents to an ever-restless mind.

Mission Statement

We feel THAT what is missing the most in today’s world. In great debate weather ART has a future in a commercialized world of ours, we say ART is the Future.

It has to be ART, though true and pure, to make it through. Gone is the tiring age of fake, pump and pretense. Gone are the murky waters. All else stripped – ART stands in all its naked Relevance.

We believe in ART. Not as just another way of making a living, but as the very Way of Life.

We are the Underground and we stand in a subversive opposition to all and every accepted tacitly way the commercially driven society treats ART. We consider ART being a form of ultimate subversion in a greed-glorifying world and we argue a singular importance of ART outside commercialism and corrupt institutionalism within the society in crisis.

ART shall bring back what bankers had stolen from the society – the common purpose being anything else other than militant, blatant greed.

We are Classical and we stand on the shoulders of combined labor and sacrifice of cultural giants humanity managed to produce despite all its shortfalls and who were able to surpass all constraints of time and fads of the moment. The essence of their timeless creations, which is pure and true ART, stands as final testimony to in-suppressible powers of human spirit bearing extreme relevance to our time.

We stand in firm belief in fresh vitality and visceral strength of Classical, Humanistic in nature, content, philosophy and worldview for our truly modern audiences and viewers.

We are there to support and to amplify the voice of anyone across disciplines who we think is instrumental in this process.

With the Clarity of Intent we will find new ways ART can sustain itself and expand in these troubled times as Artists - some of true Heroes of Society - shall be able to enjoy the fruits of their intense, hard labor and sacrifice which is a pure Labor of Love. To that end we all work and contribute in a collaborative spirit in name of ART and Friendship. We will do everything to share ART and spread the word, as ART is the ever-flaming torch in a society facing Storm.